Rhonda Buttacavoli of Washington Township talks about her second cousin, Margaret “Kepp” Rau, while standing on the Roaring Run Trail near the Edmon trailhead with the Margaret Rau Natural Area on the hillside behind her on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2014.

Jason Bridge | Trib Total Media

Margaret “Kepp” Rau, who died in 2006 at age 92, lived almost her entire life in Apollo and grew up hiking through the woods along the Kiski River, admiring wildflowers and watching birds. A charter member of the Roaring Run Watershed Association, a 40-acre wooded parcel in Kiski Township was named the Margaret Rau Natural Area in her honor in the summer of 2014.

Jason Bridge | Trib Total Media

Rhonda Buttacavoli, right, of Washington Township walks with her son, Brian Buttacavoli, and granddaughter, Payton Buttacavoli, 3, both of Springdale, on the Roaring Run Trail near the Edmon trailhead in Kiski Township with the Margaret Rau Natural Area on the hillside above them on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2014.

Roaring Run Watershed Association

To learn more about the Roaring Run Trail and surrounding recreational property, to donate or to volunteer, visit www.roaringrun.org

We are currently undergoing updates to our site and are working to improve your experience on all devices that you use throughout your day. If you should find a page or a story that is not working correctly, please click here.

Thank you for your patience,

TribLIVE.com Team

A longtime advocate for the environment and scholarship, the late Margaret “Kepp” Rau's dedication to both now are recognized at the Roaring Run Trail.

The Roaring Run Watershed Association, which maintains the 650-acre property that includes the trail and surrounding woods in Kiski Township, this summer named a 40-acre wooded parcel after Rau.

The Margaret Rau Natural Area includes some of the last old-growth trees on the watershed's property, which was heavily logged over the years, according to Rich Dixon of Apollo, an association member.

Dixon said the Rau Natural Area, located above the formal Roaring Run Trail near the Edmon trailhead, does not include any maintained trails.

Instead, it offers visitors a chance to ramble through the woods and climb the hills for a scenic view high above the Kiski River Valley.

Rau's family said she would have appreciated the association's commitment to maintaining the area's natural habitat.

Rau, who would have turned 100 this past February, died in 2006 at the age of 92. She was a lifelong resident of Apollo until she moved to North Carolina to be with her son, Rob Rau, in her last years.

Nicknamed “Kepp” due to her maiden name of Kepple, Margaret Rau was a lifelong naturalist who enjoyed hiking through the woods, admiring wildflowers and watching birds.

“Our whole family, we're not real big on development,” Rob Rau said. “We'd like to see the natural preservation of land.”

Rau said his mother grew up exploring the Kiski River Valley and took her only child on hiking, biking and camping trips through the area.

Margaret Rau's second cousin, Rhonda Buttacavoli of Washington Township, said Rau spoke of preparing once to take her young son and his friends camping.

She researched books on the area and loaded a backpack full of them for the trip. She spent a month walking around Apollo to get in shape.

“She said, ‘I just felt it was very important to get them out in the woods,' ” Buttacavoli recalled. “It really seemed to make a difference for all of them. That's all she cared about.”

Rau also served as a librarian at Apollo Memorial Library, formed the first library at St. James Roman Catholic Church's parochial school and taught Sunday school at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Apollo.

A charter member when the Roaring Run Watershed Association formed in 1982, Rau wrote of the area's history for association newsletters and made presentations to civic groups about the organization's goals.

“She was extremely focused and dedicated,” Buttacavoli said. “She was a real credit to our community.”

In 2001, the Rau family established a $50,000 endowment to benefit trail maintenance.

Through donations and investment income, the fund has more than doubled. It recently was used for the first time to buy a tractor, Rob Rau said.

“It's amazing what the people who work with the watershed have done over the years,” he said. “To me, it's a real asset to the Kiski Valley.”

In addition to working toward the continued expansion of a trail network along the Kiski River, Dixon said the group is considering adding an environmental learning center near the main Roaring Run trailhead outside Apollo.

Buttacavoli, also an association member, said she'd like to see more schools and youth groups get kids on the trail and learning about the environment and the region's history.

She'd especially like people to know about the efforts made to reclaim the Kiski River and its surroundings that once were ravaged by acid mine drainage and the region's industrial past.

“Growing up, the river was orange and it was dead,” Buttacavoli said. “You didn't want to spend any time there. It's not like that anymore.”

“In explaining how you practice stewardship and how (the river) has been cleaned up, you can also teach the kids about the older history — iron furnaces and what it took to survive in the Pennsylvania wilderness.”

John Linkes of Leechburg, another association member, said this is the first time a portion of watershed property has been named in someone's honor.

The group plans to place a marker near the Edmon trailhead recognizing the Margaret Rau Natural Area.

They want to include a quotation from Henry David Thoreau: “I think that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”

Buttacavoli wasn't certain how Rau, whose ashes were scattered on watershed property, would react to having the natural area named in her honor.

“She was very practical and down to earth and unassuming,” Buttacavoli said. “I think she would be very touched and pretty surprised. I know she'd be delighted it's being preserved.”

Liz Hayes is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 724-226-4680 or lhayes@tribweb.com.

You are solely responsible for your comments and by using TribLive.com you agree to our
Terms of Service.

We moderate comments. Our goal is to provide substantive commentary for a general readership. By screening submissions, we provide a space where readers can share intelligent and informed commentary that enhances the quality of our news and information.

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderating decisions are subjective. We will make them as carefully and consistently as we can. Because of the volume of reader comments, we cannot review individual moderation decisions with readers.

We value thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point quickly and politely. We make an effort to protect discussions from repeated comments either by the same reader or different readers

We follow the same standards for taste as the daily newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, proselytizing and SHOUTING. Don't include URLs to Web sites.

We do not edit comments. They are either approved or deleted. We reserve the right to edit a comment that is quoted or excerpted in an article. In this case, we may fix spelling and punctuation.

We welcome strong opinions and criticism of our work, but we don't want comments to become bogged down with discussions of our policies and we will moderate accordingly.

We appreciate it when readers and people quoted in articles or blog posts point out errors of fact or emphasis and will investigate all assertions. But these suggestions should be sent
via e-mail. To avoid distracting other readers, we won't publish comments that suggest a correction. Instead, corrections will be made in a blog post or in an article.